I began skating when I was 13 years old at the Pasadena
Winter Gardens in CA. About half the
Olympic team in 1960 and 1964, came out of Southern California so it was an
ideal time for a youth to come up through the ranks. In January 1963 I headed north to Edmonton,
Alberta and spent two seasons there skating on the 400m track. The second season I did very well breaking
the North American records for 3,000 and 5,000m. Based on those performances I received an
invitation to join coach Johs. Tenman in
Hamar, Norway to train with his team, Hamar Skoyteklub under Hamar Idrettslag. I jumped at the opportunity and arrived in
Hamar on September 15, 1964. Seems like
last week. It was a brutal transition
from Clarke Stadium in Edmonton to racing in front of the big crowds in Norway
but when you are young, insane and full of testosterone anything is
doable. Almost 16 years later I my
closed my business, sold the house and came back to the US for good.
Bart's Journal: Reminiscings of an avid runner, former speed skater, and a few tidbits I picked up along the way...
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 101, verses 77 through 80
“According to the laws and constitution of the people,
which I have suffered to be established, and should be maintained for the rights
and protection of all flesh, according to just and holy principles;
That
everyman may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to
the moral agency which I have given unto him, that everyman may be accountable
for his own sins in the day of judgment.
Therefore,
it is not right that any man should be in bondage one to another.
And
for this purpose have I established the Constitution of this land, by the hands
of wise men whom I raised up unto this very purpose, and redeemed the land by
the shedding of blood.”
Doctrine and Covenants, Section 101,
verses 77 through 80
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
The story of Emil Zatopek is quite interesting, be sure to read this one. "Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Rock
Running Editor's Note: The story of Emil Zatopek is quite interesting, be sure
to read this one.
"Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Emil Zatopek was simply the most remarkable athlete in the history of long distance running. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, a country with little running history, he was a self-made man who conquered the world. In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Zatopek won the magic distance triple-the 5000 meters, the 10,000 meters and the marathon, setting Olympic records in all three. The marathon was his first, and his time of 2:23:04 was a world best for an out-and-back course. As the second finisher came into the stadium 2 1/2 minutes behind him, Zatopek was happily chatting with his wife Dana (gold medalist in the javelin) and munching on an apple, while the air reverberated with the cheer "Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek!"
Zatopek's method was the interval system, though he apparently knew nothing of Gerschler and Reindell when he adopted it. His own common sense led him to intervals; he eventually proved that they worked for marathoners as well as for the 400-/800-meter runners that Harbig represented. Zatopek says he began running repeated, fast 100-meter sprints when he realized long, steady training runs could not instill the speed that competition requires. At first, people thought he was crazy. "You can't train for 5000 meters by running the 100," they argued quite logically. "True," Zatopek acknowledged, "unless I run 100 meters 50 times," which he proceeded to do while the other Czech distance runners looked on in amazement.
So revolutionary was Zatopek's training, so astonishing its intensity, and so phenomenal his racing results, that word of his daily regimen quickly outstripped its actuality. It was widely rumored that he was doing 60x400 meters in 60 seconds, a workout that almost surely surpasses man's ability, as more than one world-class runner discovered in trying to duplicate it. Yet when people saw him racing, they were willing to believe almost anything. The sight of Zatopek on the track was positively riveting. No one has given freer vent to racing's agony. He tilted his head, furrowed his brow, wagged his tongue out of his mouth, rolled his shoulders, twisted his arms across his body, and appeared on the brink of an epileptic seizure. Red Smith wrote that spectators "still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain." Few noticed that his running form was perfect from the waist down.
Even today, much contradictory information persists about Zatopek's training. We know for certain that he trained prodigiously and largely on the track, but without a stopwatch and certainly not at anything approaching a 60-second pace. In fact, by the standards of today's track training, much of his running would be considered quite slow.
It was the quantity of Zatopek's interval training that produced results. His training for the 1948 London Olympic Games, in which he won the 10,000 meters, consisted of daily workouts of 5 x 200 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x200 meters. Immediately prior to the London Games, Zatopek reportedly ran 60 x 400 meters for 10 days in a row. Four years later, feeling that he needed even more training to ensure a triple victory in Helsinki, Zatopek began running 5 x 100 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x 100 meters twice a day.
If the training sounds repetitious and boring, Zatopek's approach was anything but. Interval training appealed to him because he found it infinitely variable. He tried hundreds of different combinations of repeats, distances and speeds before he settled on the ones that best suited him. He was willing to experiment with all manner of training. He would run through knee-deep snow in his army boots, he would sprint from telephone pole to telephone pole holding his breath, he would run with Dana on his shoulders (which resulted in his suffering a hernia condition). He was a human dynamo off the track and on. Gordon Pirie, who idolized him, once visited Emil and Dana at their home. "These two used to romp like children or like beautiful young animals in their perfect fitness of body," he wrote. "Once, in fun, he threw her into a stream. Unfortunately, her foot hit a rock and she broke an ankle. I have seen him and his wife hurling a javelin full-tilt toward each other. The trick was to catch it in the air above their heads and return it as fast as possible. A dangerous game, and they Loved it.
"One secret of his success was that he never let himself get bored. He would jog for hours on the same spot, reading a book or listening to the radio. Everything was fun to him. On wash days at home he piled all the dirty clothes in the bath and then ran on them for hours. His mind was always as active as his body."
Ultimately, the specifics of Zatopek's training are less important than his spirit and determination. He won because he was unwilling to acknowledge boundaries. He pushed training for distance running light-years beyond anyone before him, saw it not as drudgery but as a daily experiment, and raised it to the level of art. Typically, Zatopek found nothing unusual about his abilities or his training. His philosophy was as matter-of-fact as it was Promethean. "When a person trains once, nothing happens," he said. "When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn't matter. Am I tired? That doesn't matter, either. Then willpower becomes no longer a problem."
Since the day Emil Zatopek toed the 10,000-meter starting line at the 1948 Olympics, distance running has not been the same. Such a sweeping statement can be made of no other man.
Zatopek's amazing 100 x 400m reps
In spite of the great success of Kolehmainen, Nurmi, and Hagg, interval training didn't really take off until after World War II, and it was not a Finn but a notable Czechoslovakian athlete, Emil Zatopek, who perhaps did the best job of convincing the athletic world at large that intervals represented an unparalleled training technique. Zatopek used a somewhat unusual interval combination: he ran relatively short repeats, often no more than 400m in length, but instead of blazing through these relatively short interval distances at high speeds, he ran them at close to his lactate-threshold velocity, ie well below both 10k and 5k race speeds (3).
The hard-working Czech was known to rattle off 100(!) of these 400m reps per day, alternated with 200m recoveries. Scientists later reckoned (op cit) that Zatopek reached lactate-threshold speed at about 85% of his vVO2max (ie at a pace of about 72 seconds per 400m), which meant that on a 100-work-interval day he was completing about 40k of work intervals in just 120 minutes or so. (Before you become completely incredulous, don't forget that there were 99 'recoveries' injected into such running to make the 100 x 400 scheme more palatable.) Zatopek's pattern of churning out high volumes of moderate-quality (below 90% VO2max) training was echoed, albeit on a less grandiose scale, by the American runner Jim Ryun in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interval training made its way into a scientific journal for the first time in 1959, when German exercise scientist H Reindell and colleagues described specific interval training carried out by top athletes and formulated some basic rules for interval work (4,5). Sigfried Hermann, an athlete described in Reindell's book, specialised neither in Zatopek's 'large bag' of slow intervals or Nurmi's 'short stack' of scalding reps; he engaged in what could be called 'variable-pace' interval training. A 3:40 1500m runner, Hermann would - within a single workout - run four sets of 6 x 200m, with rests of 50-60 seconds between the 200m work intervals and eight minutes between sets. Sigfried completed the first set at a tempo of 30 seconds per 200 (or 98% of 1500m speed), the next two sets at almost-exact 1500m race velocity, and most of the final set at 28 seconds per 200 (about 105% of 1500m race tempo). The German whizzed through the very last interval of the last set in 25 seconds, which was 118% of his race velocity over 1500m.
This variable-pace interval training, performed above and below actual race velocity, was mirrored in the early 1980s by famed British coach Frank Horwill, the founder of the British Milers' Club and mentor of two-time World Cross Country silver medallist Tim Hutchings. Horwill, however, liked to use the different paces on separate days of training, a scheme he called 'multi-paced training'. Peter Coe later based Seb Coe's overall training on Horwill's multi-speed foundation. Variably-paced intervals were also employed with great success in the 1980s by Said Aouita of Morocco, who held world records for both the 1500 and 5000m and ran at speeds ranging from lactate-threshold velocity all the way up to 1500m competition speed within the same session, with interval distances ranging from 200-3000m.
"Horrible Extremities of Pain"
Emil Zatopek was simply the most remarkable athlete in the history of long distance running. Born and raised in Czechoslovakia, a country with little running history, he was a self-made man who conquered the world. In the 1952 Helsinki Olympics, Zatopek won the magic distance triple-the 5000 meters, the 10,000 meters and the marathon, setting Olympic records in all three. The marathon was his first, and his time of 2:23:04 was a world best for an out-and-back course. As the second finisher came into the stadium 2 1/2 minutes behind him, Zatopek was happily chatting with his wife Dana (gold medalist in the javelin) and munching on an apple, while the air reverberated with the cheer "Za-to-pek! Za-to-pek!"
Zatopek's method was the interval system, though he apparently knew nothing of Gerschler and Reindell when he adopted it. His own common sense led him to intervals; he eventually proved that they worked for marathoners as well as for the 400-/800-meter runners that Harbig represented. Zatopek says he began running repeated, fast 100-meter sprints when he realized long, steady training runs could not instill the speed that competition requires. At first, people thought he was crazy. "You can't train for 5000 meters by running the 100," they argued quite logically. "True," Zatopek acknowledged, "unless I run 100 meters 50 times," which he proceeded to do while the other Czech distance runners looked on in amazement.
So revolutionary was Zatopek's training, so astonishing its intensity, and so phenomenal his racing results, that word of his daily regimen quickly outstripped its actuality. It was widely rumored that he was doing 60x400 meters in 60 seconds, a workout that almost surely surpasses man's ability, as more than one world-class runner discovered in trying to duplicate it. Yet when people saw him racing, they were willing to believe almost anything. The sight of Zatopek on the track was positively riveting. No one has given freer vent to racing's agony. He tilted his head, furrowed his brow, wagged his tongue out of his mouth, rolled his shoulders, twisted his arms across his body, and appeared on the brink of an epileptic seizure. Red Smith wrote that spectators "still wake up screaming in the dark when Emil the Terrible goes writhing through their dreams, clawing at his abdomen in horrible extremities of pain." Few noticed that his running form was perfect from the waist down.
Even today, much contradictory information persists about Zatopek's training. We know for certain that he trained prodigiously and largely on the track, but without a stopwatch and certainly not at anything approaching a 60-second pace. In fact, by the standards of today's track training, much of his running would be considered quite slow.
It was the quantity of Zatopek's interval training that produced results. His training for the 1948 London Olympic Games, in which he won the 10,000 meters, consisted of daily workouts of 5 x 200 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x200 meters. Immediately prior to the London Games, Zatopek reportedly ran 60 x 400 meters for 10 days in a row. Four years later, feeling that he needed even more training to ensure a triple victory in Helsinki, Zatopek began running 5 x 100 meters, 20 x 400 meters and 5 x 100 meters twice a day.
If the training sounds repetitious and boring, Zatopek's approach was anything but. Interval training appealed to him because he found it infinitely variable. He tried hundreds of different combinations of repeats, distances and speeds before he settled on the ones that best suited him. He was willing to experiment with all manner of training. He would run through knee-deep snow in his army boots, he would sprint from telephone pole to telephone pole holding his breath, he would run with Dana on his shoulders (which resulted in his suffering a hernia condition). He was a human dynamo off the track and on. Gordon Pirie, who idolized him, once visited Emil and Dana at their home. "These two used to romp like children or like beautiful young animals in their perfect fitness of body," he wrote. "Once, in fun, he threw her into a stream. Unfortunately, her foot hit a rock and she broke an ankle. I have seen him and his wife hurling a javelin full-tilt toward each other. The trick was to catch it in the air above their heads and return it as fast as possible. A dangerous game, and they Loved it.
"One secret of his success was that he never let himself get bored. He would jog for hours on the same spot, reading a book or listening to the radio. Everything was fun to him. On wash days at home he piled all the dirty clothes in the bath and then ran on them for hours. His mind was always as active as his body."
Ultimately, the specifics of Zatopek's training are less important than his spirit and determination. He won because he was unwilling to acknowledge boundaries. He pushed training for distance running light-years beyond anyone before him, saw it not as drudgery but as a daily experiment, and raised it to the level of art. Typically, Zatopek found nothing unusual about his abilities or his training. His philosophy was as matter-of-fact as it was Promethean. "When a person trains once, nothing happens," he said. "When a person forces himself to do a thing a hundred or a thousand times, then he certainly has developed in ways more than physical. Is it raining? That doesn't matter. Am I tired? That doesn't matter, either. Then willpower becomes no longer a problem."
Since the day Emil Zatopek toed the 10,000-meter starting line at the 1948 Olympics, distance running has not been the same. Such a sweeping statement can be made of no other man.
Zatopek's amazing 100 x 400m reps
In spite of the great success of Kolehmainen, Nurmi, and Hagg, interval training didn't really take off until after World War II, and it was not a Finn but a notable Czechoslovakian athlete, Emil Zatopek, who perhaps did the best job of convincing the athletic world at large that intervals represented an unparalleled training technique. Zatopek used a somewhat unusual interval combination: he ran relatively short repeats, often no more than 400m in length, but instead of blazing through these relatively short interval distances at high speeds, he ran them at close to his lactate-threshold velocity, ie well below both 10k and 5k race speeds (3).
The hard-working Czech was known to rattle off 100(!) of these 400m reps per day, alternated with 200m recoveries. Scientists later reckoned (op cit) that Zatopek reached lactate-threshold speed at about 85% of his vVO2max (ie at a pace of about 72 seconds per 400m), which meant that on a 100-work-interval day he was completing about 40k of work intervals in just 120 minutes or so. (Before you become completely incredulous, don't forget that there were 99 'recoveries' injected into such running to make the 100 x 400 scheme more palatable.) Zatopek's pattern of churning out high volumes of moderate-quality (below 90% VO2max) training was echoed, albeit on a less grandiose scale, by the American runner Jim Ryun in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Interval training made its way into a scientific journal for the first time in 1959, when German exercise scientist H Reindell and colleagues described specific interval training carried out by top athletes and formulated some basic rules for interval work (4,5). Sigfried Hermann, an athlete described in Reindell's book, specialised neither in Zatopek's 'large bag' of slow intervals or Nurmi's 'short stack' of scalding reps; he engaged in what could be called 'variable-pace' interval training. A 3:40 1500m runner, Hermann would - within a single workout - run four sets of 6 x 200m, with rests of 50-60 seconds between the 200m work intervals and eight minutes between sets. Sigfried completed the first set at a tempo of 30 seconds per 200 (or 98% of 1500m speed), the next two sets at almost-exact 1500m race velocity, and most of the final set at 28 seconds per 200 (about 105% of 1500m race tempo). The German whizzed through the very last interval of the last set in 25 seconds, which was 118% of his race velocity over 1500m.
This variable-pace interval training, performed above and below actual race velocity, was mirrored in the early 1980s by famed British coach Frank Horwill, the founder of the British Milers' Club and mentor of two-time World Cross Country silver medallist Tim Hutchings. Horwill, however, liked to use the different paces on separate days of training, a scheme he called 'multi-paced training'. Peter Coe later based Seb Coe's overall training on Horwill's multi-speed foundation. Variably-paced intervals were also employed with great success in the 1980s by Said Aouita of Morocco, who held world records for both the 1500 and 5000m and ran at speeds ranging from lactate-threshold velocity all the way up to 1500m competition speed within the same session, with interval distances ranging from 200-3000m.
Friday, January 15, 2010
January Poem
Winter
Damn
It’s cold
Isn’t that beautiful? I thought it sums everything up; short, sweet, and to the point!
Damn
It’s cold
Isn’t that beautiful? I thought it sums everything up; short, sweet, and to the point!
Monday, November 16, 2009
Poem: Antigonish
Poem of the Month : “Antigonish”
William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) was an American educator and poet. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a Professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905-1920. Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem “Antigonish” a well known rhyme, composed in 1899 as a song for a play he had written called The Psyco-ed. The play was performed in 1910 and the poem was first published as “Antigonish” in 1922. The poem also appeared in the movie Identity.
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
“Antigonish” (1899)
William Hughes Mearns (1875-1965) was an American educator and poet. A graduate of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, Mearns was a Professor at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy from 1905-1920. Mearns is remembered now as the author of the poem “Antigonish” a well known rhyme, composed in 1899 as a song for a play he had written called The Psyco-ed. The play was performed in 1910 and the poem was first published as “Antigonish” in 1922. The poem also appeared in the movie Identity.
Yesterday upon the stair
I saw a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
When I came home last night at three
The man was waiting there for me
But when I looked around the hall
I couldn’t see him there at all!
Go away, go away, don’t you come back any more!
Go away, go away, and please don’t slam the door
Last night I saw upon the stair
A little man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
Oh, how I wish he’d go away
“Antigonish” (1899)
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
What is the best Fartlek?
When I lived in Norway I was taught that fartlek was
totally intuitive or instinctive. There was no set schedule other than
starting off easier and picking up the pace with shorter quicker distances as
you went. The determining factors were how you felt at the time along with
the terrain and footing. The way I was coached you would determine the
success of a particular fartlek training session by how you felt at the
completion. You should feel invigorated and not exhausted. Obviously this is
not something you learn overnight and I believe some people never learn how
to take full advantage of what fartlek has to offer.
As a sidebar, I believe there is something lost in the English translation. In Norway and Sweden there was as much emphasis on "lek" or play, as there was on "fart", speed or motion. In Norwegian or Swedish, fart is a word used to describe motion, and it can be either slow, fast or any velocity in between. The word for "speed" in Norwegian is "hurtig" or "hurtighet". So to be correctly translated, from a running perspective, the English term should actually be "motion" or "velocity variation" play. Hope this helps you discover a very enjoyable and beneficial way to train. All the best. - Bartman |
Friday, June 26, 2009
Efforts, Achievements, and Perspective
(email June
26, 2009)
Mark,
In the early 1990's a friend
of mine from Utah was involved in an expedition to Mt. Everest. John made
it as far as the "Hillary Step" and had to turn back because of the
deteriorating weather and fatigue. You might say he made it to the 23
mile mark of a marathon. As the month of May developed it turn out
that this was the only chance he was to be allowed before the team was required
to leave Base Camp. Because he "went for it", John's life was
changed for the better. He has since become a very successful
business man and motivational speaker.
I know how you feel about the marathon experience. It can be
devastating, if we allow it to be. I had a similar situation years ago
getting ready for the speed skating season and the Olympics trials.
Sometimes things happen completely beyond our control and all we can do is
make the best of it. But it is never wasted. The total
experience, the training, the mental prep, the constant self analysis, the
commitment and effort, all these things change us; and change us for the better.
Life has a slightly different trajectory after such a commitment than it did
before.
That aside, we are extremely proud of you that you "went
for it" and did not let the weather force you off track. Some
might say you should have altered your plans, but your goal was to PR, not
just run another marathon. As one friend of mine once said, "it
is not fail to try and fail, and try and fail again; we fail when we try and
fail, and fail to try again." Once you are fully recovered, I
have this strange gut feeling that you are going to be a total pain the ass to
beat this summer and through the fall. Be kind to yourself and make
sure it happens.
We are really sorry to hear about Julie. Please send her our
most heartfelt best wishes for her complete and speedy recovery.
Surgery can really take a lot out of a person, but fortunately in her
favor she was in very good condition going into this. Patience
is rarely a strong point for most runners, and this will take time to
bounce back from. She needs to listen to her body, and you can help
her with this, and not demand more of it than it is able to
handle. The last thing she needs is an injury on top of all
this. As a follow up quote to my article "The Art of
Running", Mark Wetmore once stated, "We try to learn to pay attention
to sensory data. There is no machine or device that is as accurate as
that, if you learn how to read it. It's hard to learn how to
read it; some people never learn." In the context of what he
was talking about at the time, some runners are living so far in the
future with regards to what they hope and dream to achieve, that they are
never in the 'now time' long enough to pay attention what their body is telling
them today. Again, I think you are well qualified to give some excellent
advice to her in expediting the process.
Stay in touch.
All the best,
Bart and Eve
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